


I Wish I Was A Photograph

by rockinrye



Category: Glee
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-22 23:28:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockinrye/pseuds/rockinrye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every year on Beth's birthday, Shelby sends Quinn and Puck a fat envelope containing a long "status update" and lots of photos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Wish I Was A Photograph

When the first fat yellow envelope shows up in her mailbox she nearly chokes on nothing but air. She recognizes Shelby’s handwriting before anything; remembers the way it curves confidently, how it looked on the adoption papers. She can’t breathe and she has no idea what to do so she just stands in the doorway for what feels like forever, torn between clutching it to her chest and dropping it to the ground.

Once a year she’s overwhelmed with eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours of missed moments. Pretty words about the happy baby ( _hers_ she tries not to think), then toddler, then girl come plummeting down like the summer’s first rain.

She’s got Puck’s eyes and Lucy’s hair – god, why hadn’t she thought it pretty when it was her own? She practically glows and the sun seems to follow her in every picture. It drips off the words Shelby uses to describe her too. Words like bright and smart and attentive. Even the words like mischievous and sneaky.

She’s happy, so happy and she thinks (knows) that that’s always what she’s wanted for her. Sometimes, though, she wishes that she could’ve been the one to make her happy. Santana tells her she is and she did; that by being aware that she couldn’t do it she’d given her what she needed most. She knows she’s right, but the tears always come when she reads the words that are the only reason she knows her daughter.

The tears don’t have a set starting point. Sometimes they come with the opening sentence (Beth turned one this year) or the closing one (She asked why you won’t come visit. Will you try this year?). Sometimes the tears start on something benign like, “her favorite word for two weeks was ladybug” or a little scary (she broke her arm in a soccer match).

When the fifth envelope comes she’s in her dorm room in DC. Her roommate a bed over has a blanket wrapped around her head as she watches something on the Internet with high tech speakers over her ears.

 _She loves chalk_ , the third page says and it seems like no time passes before she finds herself in an aisle in Target wondering which set she’d like best. This year her favorite color is orange and last year it was blue. She wonders what envelope will carry the absolute choice and hopes it’ll be green like hers.

There’s a box in the mail in the morning heading for the state she only visits once a year, landing on a doorstep she refuses to shadow. A week later a small envelope is in her mailbox, the first in her hands before May. There are no words just a picture of a small body and tiny fist clutching teal chalk to fill in a balloon surrounded by hearts; her own pulses in her chest.

It becomes routine to follow the envelopes that still make her squirm with a package. She never sends it before, always afraid she’ll get something wrong. There’s always a picture or a note. Once, even, a drawing. She can’t bring herself to frame anything so they all rest in a bright blue box beneath her bed.

The tenth envelope knocks the air out of her lungs and all the blood she holds seems to gallop to her heart. It’s not large and yellow. It’s hot pink with a smiley face stamp and her name written twice, the first crossed out because the “I” is before the “U”.

 _Mommy said I could tell you about myself this year,_ it begins. It takes her two days and thirteen tries to read it without feeling like breathing isn’t a liberty she’s afforded.

Her favorite color is green. Her favorite subject is history and she got detention for the first time two weeks ago for punching a boy named Mark in the nose after he called her friend Lily dumb. She has a big, big trophy from the soccer championship her team, The Ladybugs, won and Mommy lets her keep it on her nightstand.

 _I want to know what you look like_ , it says toward the end. _Mommy says you haven’t wanted to send a picture, but I’d really like one. I keep a picture of Dad in my drawer and I see me in his face but there are parts missing like a puzzle. Mommy says this is hard for you but it’s hard for me too wondering where I get my lips and hair. She says my eyebrows are yours. I’d like to see them, if you want to let me._

She throws seven flat stationery cards away before she decides that she doesn’t have the right words. Instead, she slides a four by six-inch missed moment into an envelope and takes a teal Sharpie to the back of the image to draw her own balloon.

It's a start.


End file.
